In the field of oil and gas production, a subsurface hydrocarbon reservoir is exploited when one or more well bores are drilled into the reservoir and liquid hydrocarbons (e.g. oil and gas) are extracted from the reservoir through the well bores. In this event, the well bore is generally referred to as a production well or a production source. A fluid, typically water, may be introduced into the reservoir at one or more points away from the production well to displace liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons, which causes them to be expelled from the reservoir through the production well. The point at which water is introduced into the reservoir is generally referred to as an injection well or injection source.
The expulsion of liquid and/or gaseous hydrocarbons at the production well and the injection of water at the injection well establish a fluid flow pattern in the reservoir, which may be influenced by gravity. The fluid flow within the reservoir may be modeled as a function of time in order to predict how the production of liquid and/or gaseous hydrocarbons from a particular production well will vary over the lifetime of the reservoir.
A mathematical model of the fluid flow in a given reservoir may be constructed by using techniques well known in the art. These techniques, however, are not exact and may be implemented using other numerical techniques to arrive at an estimated solution such as, for example, streamline techniques and finite difference techniques.
Conventional streamline techniques are generally used to compute streamlines, also referred to as a streamline model, that represent the fluid path in a subsurface reservoir between one injection source and a production source and the fluid velocity for each respective streamline. In order to visualize the fluid velocity for a given streamline in a subsurface reservoir, streamlines have been color coded based on predetermined time steps. The color coded portion of the streamline therefore, is updated to reflect the fluid velocity. For example, a portion of a streamline may be colored red to illustrate where a particle representing the fluid velocity for the streamline has already traveled and another portion of the streamline may be colored blue to illustrate where the particle has yet to travel.
Other, more advanced, techniques have been developed to visualize fluid flow in subsurface reservoirs. One technique displays streamlines by assigning a property of each streamline to a visual animation such as, for example, fluid velocity that can be assigned color and size codes to show phase components, rate, volume, statistics and many other properties. The fluid velocity along the streamline therefore, may be displayed as marbles, for example, rolling along the streamline at speeds equal to the velocity of the different types of fluid. The marbles, or other objects representing the fluid velocity for the streamline, can be released at regular time intervals and may move along the streamline at a velocity representing the actual fluid velocity or some other assigned property. These techniques, however, can obstruct portions of the streamline in a display and/or may be limited in complex, compact streamline models where the objects representing the fluid velocity must be displayed adjacent to a respective streamline. In this event, the desired visualization of the fluid velocity is limited to the extent the objects cannot be displayed on a respective streamline and may only be displayed outside the complex, compact streamline model.